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Review Summary

A recurrent image in “The Zen of Bennett,” Unjoo Moon’s tender, touching documentary portrait of the singer Tony Bennett, now 86, is of an unblinking eye in the sky gazing through turbulent clouds. It is as good a visual metaphor as any for the career of a singer who has flourished by keeping a steady focus on what has mattered most to him for more than six decades: the American Songbook. If Mr. Bennett looks down from on high, he also looks up from below. For there is hardly a moment when you are not aware that Mr. Bennett, who appears soft-spoken, unpretentious and sometimes at a loss for words, comes from a place of deep humility. He admits to having made “mistakes.” And his emphasis on the word suggests that they were not trivial. But that was then. As for now, he declares, “I love to sing and paint, and as far as I’m concerned, I’ve never worked a day in my life,” adding that “they’re the only things I know how to do.” Along the way he has weathered the interference of music moguls like Mitch Miller, who pressured him to record commercial fluff for Columbia Records, and waited out the rock insurgency of the 1960s and ’70s that made him and the music he championed profoundly unfashionable. — Stephen Holden